I need a little assistance with some numbers. I need to set the monetary amount for a prince's ransom, and I want the amount to be realistic, should someone actually do the research and check my numbers.

This is for Peter's Angel. Peter is being held for ransom (and later Nathan gets held on the same amount), and I need the price to be something his country, Reval, can't pay easily.

Here's the set up. Reval is a somewhat poor rural fief. I'm estimating that you can ride across it on horseback in about 6 hours if you're in a rush. It's mostly farmland, forests, and medium-sized towns. It's relatively poor compared to Alaidia, the massive, extravagant, and very wealthy motherland. It doesn't help that Alaidia taxes the fief very heavily - like 17% or something crazy... While Reval is autonomous, it's little more than a revenue-generating farm for Alaidia. Mostly self-sustaining, very little industry or trading outside of that with Alaidia, etc.

When Peter is kidnapped by a revengeful noblewoman, she sets an extreme and ridiculous amount for his ransom. The amount is high enough that Peter's father can't pay it easily. There isn't that kind of money in the treasury, so if they were to scrounge it up, they'd have to tax the people (who aren't rich either) or, worse, borrow money from Alaidia. It's doable, but it would cripple the country and worsen their relative poverty.

I haven't decided for sure on the noblewoman's motives, but I think it will be something like this. The previous Revalian king had a system of landlords working for him (of whom the noblewoman was one), who taxed the people for use of the land. In this way, the previous king made himself relatively rich and was able to pay Alaidia's tax with other people's money.

But when Peter's father took the throne, he dismissed the landlords and reorganized the way the land was taxed. While it's much fairer, it also means Peter's father has significantly less revenue than his predecessor. So Peter's father doesn't make an excruciating amount as king and therefore doesn't have much to spend. Also, Alaidia's tax has been gradually increasing... etc. and so forth.

But here's the catch. I want the amount to be such that Alaidia could pay it easily. Ideally, the amount will strike a fine balance so that it's just enough to be excruciating (but not utterly impossible) for Reval, while it's low enough that Alaidia's king would be willing to toss it around for something very important to him like a prince's ransom.

So my question is - what kind of amount should I set? I'll decide an amount in modern USD and convert it to the historical currency I need.

So... what do you think? 1 million? 500k? What would you, as the reader, buy as an excruciating amount?

Keep in mind that this is fantasy-historical... roughly the colonial era. So if you picked a small American colony, taxed it heavily, and then picked an amount that the governor couldn't pay easily, you'd be in the right ballpark.

Thanks, everyone!

Well I can give you some numbers on different royalty that were ransomed.

Richard the first of England: 150,000 marks. This was the net profit of England for an entire year.

King John II of France: 3 million crowns

Those were the only ones I could think of.
I think a prince's ransom could be more so than a king. A king would be more likely to pay any price to get his heir back.

Now that was really helpful! I knew there had been kings held for ransom in the past, but I couldn't remember who. So having some real historical numbers gives me something to go off of.

*converts those amounts to USD* To the best of my Google abilities, King John's ransom is worth about $432,913,124,941.15. I wonder if I did that right...

Probably, because we also have inflation.

Yeah, I converted from crowns (shillings) to pounds, then from 1360s pounds to modern-day pound value, then from pounds to USD...

Saying that some amount is equivalent to some other amount "in today's money" is in my opinion not all that useful, though; remember that today's U.S. middle-class, for example, is on the whole far richer than the wealthiest rich people of previous centuries ever dreamed. And there's a quote from (I think) Dorothy Sayers to the effect that she never thought she'd be rich enough to afford a car, nor so poor as to not be able to afford servants.

There's also the problem of (as already mentioned) inflation. Not just that it has to be taken into account in conversions over time, but that our entire modern economy is built on the assumption that the amount of currency is going to grow, so each unit of it will slowly become worth less and less (i.e. the price of more or less everything will rise). In the Middle Ages, the opposite was true: there was no such thing as "currency" that wasn't per se valuable, and money tended to be taken out of circulation whenever it didn't have to be spent, which if anything increased the value of what remained in circulation.

What would be far more useful to me is the original amount, plus information like what fraction this was of the combined wealth of every royal treasury in Europe at the time, what the annual tax revenue was, how much was a typical day's wages for a laborer, and so on.

That was very helpful, Jon! I agree. With the help of a friend I'm trying to look up some of those historical numbers to give me some facts to work with. My story deals with a quasi colonial American setting, so if I could find out the net wealth of a colony, that would be suburb... I'm just having a little trouble digging up the information I need.

Whew! I did a lot of research today, most of which was relatively unfruitful. However, with a lot of help from a very patient and tolerant Katie, I think I've figured it out.

Here's some numbers... (All of this is in current USD, since the fact figure I started with was in current USD.)

Estimated annual gross income in Reval: $10 million
Alaidia’s income tax, charged on all citizens equally: 17.26%
Alaidia’s annual earnings from Reval: $1,726,000

Estimated amount of gross income spent per household: 65%
Estimated amount of taxable sales within Reval annually: $6.5 million
King’s sale tax under Stephen I: 3%
Annual sales tax revenue: $195,000

The king also has some supplemental income from levies and special taxes, as well as taking a percentage of the property tax that his earls charge. But I don't have concrete numbers for those at the moment.

So, all things considered (including the fact that my oversimplified economics are probably off), the king makes between $200k-300k annually. Given that information, a ransom of $500k is crippling but not unrealistic. Reval would definitely have to borrow from Alaidia to get that amount, but it could be done without toppling the country. Alaidia, on the other hand, could easily come up with that money on short notice.

Thoughts?

That sounds fine. Regardless of whether your economics are completely accurate, what you've listed is all logical and consistent in and of itself, which is often all that is needed in a story.

Thank you, Jonathan! It "feels" right, too. The numbers just fit the rough essence I was going for with Reval's economy. So I think that's a good sign.

You're welcome. I think so, too.

The one problem I see with these figures is that they rely solely upon tax models that were developed in the last century and a half. From the ancient world until quite recently, most taxes (levied in money, that is---farmers were of course expected to give a substantial share of their produce to their sovereign) were direct taxes, levied either per capita (like the temple taxes in the Bible) or based on one's occupation, or later what we now call excise taxes (which were arguably the immediate cause that sparked the American Revolution ...). You can posit that currency was developed early in your world and is common enough for it to have become the preferred form of taxes (rather than "income" taxes being collected in kind), and that modern income and sales taxes are widely accepted, as you're writing in a world that is Decidedly Not Earth ... but you'll have to think about how that could fit with the rest of your description.

That is a good point, Jon. However, most of these numbers aren't going to show up in the novel. (Only the ransom amount is truly essential.) The heavy taxes from Alaidia are referenced, and it's mentioned in brief that Stephen is taxing his people a lot less heavily than his predecessors. But as for how those taxes are charged and collected, and the specific amounts thereof, it isn't discussed much. Just the essence and net effect is conveyed. So, I don't think I'll have an issue.

Fair enough.

I'm working on the scene where the ransom is introduced today... For those curious, the final amount is 10,000 British pounds circa 1800, which converts to £321,700.00 current (2005), which is roughly $501,950.96 USD. That last conversion is not precise, since it's going off of (I presume) the current exchange rate and not the 2005 exchange rate, but it's close enough.

Like I said, cross-century currency "conversions" are somewhat dubious. (Like many such conversions between present-day currencies of countries with vastly different situations; in some countries it's apparently possible to live some sort of a life on a few dollars a day, while here the cost of living for the poor is an order of magnitude or two higher.) More helpful, at least in my opinion, is that (based on Pride and Prejudice, published c. 1815), 10,000 pounds was not an unusual yearly income from a "great estate", and was ten times a not-unusual yearly income for a nouveau riche only a generation or two removed from (theatrical shudder) trade.

I agree on the accuracy of such conversions, and if I were writing a historical fiction novel, I would need more information. However, for the purposes of a quasi-fantasy novel, I think this will suffice. Also, I got my number by working off of a historical figure regarding incomes in the US circa 1800, which is the essence I am going for with my novel. So I have some foundation.